Scrivener: A Writer's Best Friend

Do you know that annoying feeling when you're writing a possible novel and all your different ideas, headcanons, characters, settings etc. are jumbled into a chaos of word documents? Every writer has probably experienced this at least. The thing is though, writing doesn't have to be like that.

About a year ago I made a Masterlist for Writers with convenient websites for writing. I also mentioned the computer tool/program Scrivener, but never really elaborated much on it. Scrivener is an amazing tool for writers (aspiring novelists and students who have to write papers alike) that will make the whole process so much more organized, so it's about time I make a post about it!

What is Scrivener?

I could go into excrutating detail about what Scrivener is, but Wikipedia does the job so much better, so here it is:

"Scrivener is a word-processing program designed for authors. Scrivener provides a management system for documents, notes and metadata. This allows the user to organize notes, concepts, research and whole documents for easy access and reference (documents including text, images, PDF, audio, video, web pages, etc.). After writing a piece of text the user may export it to a standard word processor for formatting."

This is a basic description of the program, but there's much more to it. So let me elaborate on some of its aspects below.Corkboards Scrivener works with a cork board of sorts where all the information you've collected is stored into organised notes. For example, the chapter board looks like this:

The great thing about Scrivener is that you can label each note or chapter as to do, draft, done etc. This makes it really easy to keep track of your progress.

Another great asset is the corkboard for characters. It allows you to keep track of primary and secondary characters, with the lovely option of adding pictures so that you can really envision your characters!

The cork board even has templates for character descriptions AND one for settings so that you can write down every detail that might be relevant later on in your writing process.

Obviously my examples are of an empty project, thus the lack of content, but if you work consistently in Scrivener you will quickly get a board like this:

It's a really great program, especially for the more chaotic writers among us, and I really do recommend it, even if it's just to write papers.

Scrivener: A Writer's Best Friend

2014-07-03T22:15:00+02:00

Sifra M.

scrivener|writing|writing tips|

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